A community to share tips and tricks that will help yourself improve on activities, skills and various other tasks.

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things, not for facts and figures, which is what /r/TodayILearned is for. Look here for some thoughts about difference between a YSK and a TIL.

Rules

1) Your post MUST begin with YSK and have appropriate flair

2) Within your post you must include "WHY" we should know this and promote discussion of the YSK.

3) YSKs regarding Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or any other social media are NOT ALLOWED.

4) YSKs with referral links to sites such as Dropbox or Amazon are NOT ALLOWED.

5) YSKs regarding ideas or concepts based in conspiracy will be removed at the discretion of the moderators

6) YSKs that are a call to arms, which can be asking for support for charities, organizations or political parties WILL NOT BE ALLOWED.

7) This subreddit is not the place to be self-advertising your websites, products and services. YSKs that are spamming websites, products and services will be dealt with at the discretion of the moderators and may result in action against the user posting the YSK.

8) YSKs regarding computer shortcuts are no longer allowed as of June 2, 2014. It is advised that you use the search function in this subreddit or any other technology based subreddit to search for posts containing shortcuts for your OS

Or compare any of the search result links with what you actually get if you copy the link to your clipboard. Clearly this is done in the interest of maximizing analytics and the ability to monetize clicks, but I sincerely rue the loss of transparency and the potential for abuse.

This irritated me the other day to the point of searching for a solution (Google gave me no way at all to view or copy the target URL, because the green line under the link was truncated). I found a Chrome extension / Userscripts entry called Don't Track Me Google that worked perfectly, restoring the results links to the final target. Until Google breaks it by changing their system, it's on my essentials list.

For privacy reasons I just switched to duckduckgo, I respect and trust them a lot more as a company which is very important for me. If I want to search google or bing you can just add !g or !b respectively to the end of the search, !gi for images too, !gm for maps, etc. It will automatically redirect you and I honestly even prefer the interface.

Yeah, I like a lot of what I've seen of DDG and I often use their explanatory sites to introduce people to the underlying concepts. The results often let me down compared with Google, but being able to pull in Google results does help, and I dig the assorted bangs and tools.

I'm not quite at the point of making a permanent switch, but whenever I'm writing or advising on Google (I work in higher ed) I try to mention DuckDuckGo as an interesting alternative / example of various issues - particularly with regard to things of particular interest to researchers, like filter bubbles.

Website visitors (and perhaps most tech-savvy people) can and will presume where they end up could just be a genuine redirection from, in this case, PayPal. Last year, PayPal redirected their UK homepage to paypal-business.co.uk for months.

Looking at the address bar doesn't solve the problem. First of all, that's an (admittedly relatively minor) annoyance that ideally we wouldn't have to deal with. Second, even if we look at the address bar and notice that we are at a domain other than where the link purported to be taking us, how do we know whether it's a valid redirect done by the website we are trying to visit, or a phishing scam? Must we do a Google search like "PayPal, are you redirecting your UK customers to an alternate domain at the moment, specifically paypal-business.co.uk?" and hope that we find an answer? At best, that is an annoyance that ideally would be avoided, and in many cases a thought process/skill set that exceeds the capability of many Internet users.

For me (using Firefox), the "PayPal" link goes to the phishing warning if I click it, but if I middle-click it, opening it in a new tab, it actually goes to PayPal. Since I open most links by middle-clicking them, I guess I'm safer than some.

Did they just fix this 5 minutes ago in Firefox? I remember clicking the link on the site and it actually displayed PayPal.co.uk, sent me to Paypal, now it says "Boo!" but I can see the actual link displayed in the bottom corner of the browser when I hover.

Yea, but now it's sending me to the "Boo!" page every time, no matter how I click it. It's kinda weird because I remember, like 90 minutes ago, going to the article and thinking "Oh, Firefox apparently fixed that since the article was written". Now the trick suddenly works again.

All of them work on firefox 19 linux. Again, this is not a security threat, but javascript doing its job. (For example, facebook, google, stackoverflow both use the fact that you can bind javascript to links and disable the default action and show a link you may not go to on hover.)

EDIT: Update link to add commentary to the JSfiddle. Here's the jsfiddle.

The argument is that this is not a big deal because if someone is in the position to launch a Javascript attack they are in the position of doing far worse things anyway. This is like breaking into a safe to steal those plastic bins used to sort the money.

Not a threat. This is completely sensationalist, and doesn't realize that a page with malicious javascript is already completely unsafe. There is one way to trust the veracity of a site - go to it via https with a modern up-to-date browser on a trusted computer and see that it verifies as https (e.g., green https or domain bar in firefox).

If you visit a site with malicious javascript, you've already lost. They can redirect you to another page in a variety of ways (JS, meta refresh, etc.) They can bind actions like redirect to a new page to any action. They can make something that looks like a link but is really a span, etc. A lot of sites use this. Here's a jsfiddle full-screen test I came up with that demonstrates with links saying google.com going to bing.com in a variety of ways. (To play with the fiddle go to source ). And this is just a small subset of the variety of ways this could be done.

Does anyone know how I would fix this, I have Chrome & sometimes when I click on links I get redirected, should I update or restore Chrome? I believe I have something like this, and while the re-directions are obvious, they become particularly annoying.

I'm aware how the Java script works... I work with it, among other things for a living. Chances are, if you click a link from a trusted source, you're going to be Ok... But if you're on an unfamiliar site, you could be hit with this.

My comment was about how the title was worded. It makes it seem as if it's something new, and not something that's been around for a while.